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Tour Egypt aims to offer the ultimate Egyptian adventure and intimate knowledge about the country. We offer this unique experience in two ways, the first one is by organizing a tour and coming to Egypt for a visit, whether alone or in a group, and living it firsthand. The second way to experience Egypt is from the comfort of your own home: online.

Egypt: Ancient Egyptian Writing

Ancient Egyptian Writing

How do we know so much about the ancient lives of the Egyptian people? True, we have statues and also artwork covering the walls of tombs. This gives us a pretty close idea of what ancient Egyptian lives were like. But the best picture comes from the words they wrote. The ancient Egyptians wrote down everything-from magic spells and curses to medical procedures and lists of food supplies given to the pyramid builders.

Having the title of scribe was an honorable position for one to hold in Egyptian culture. Future scribes were the only people in ancient Egypt who received a formal education. For all other stations in life, the people would participate in apprenticeship situations. In order to become an "official" scribe, your father had to be a scribe, and his father had to be a scribe, and so on.

Step into an Egyptian Exhibit at your favorite museum, or study a photograph of a coffin in a good book. Walk through a temple or tomb in Egypt itself and look at the walls and doorways. Chances are you will see hieroglyphics, the Greek words for sacred writings, what the Egyptians called medu netjer or divine words.

Our English word "paper", is derived from the word "papyrus", an Egyptian word that originally meant "that which belongs to the house" (the bureaucracy of ancient Egypt). At about the same time as the ancient Egyptians moved from prehistory to history by developing a written language, they discovered the need for a medium other than stone to transcribe upon. They found this in their papyrus plant, a triangular reed which symbolized ancient lower Egypt. It was light, strong, thin, durable and easy to carry, and for thousands of years, there was nothing better for the purpose of writing. The earliest extant documented papyrus comes from Egypt's 1st Dynasty, but we believe it may have been used as early as 4,000 BC. It's use continued until about the 11th century AD.

By the Late Period of Egyptian History, just before Alexander the Great came and left his Hellenistic influence and the Ptolemies to reign over the land of Kemet, the scribes of Egypt used three distinct scripts in their writing: hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. The latter two are merely cursive derivatives of hieroglyphic. By the Roman period, a fourth script, Coptic, appeared, which was based upon the Greek alphabet and used different principles.